M. Butterfly NYC Reviews and Tickets

“No matter how good the acting, no matter that it is based on a real story, and no matter how attractive director Taymor tries to make the staging, one is hard-pressed to imagine that a man could be sleeping with another man for many years and still think he’s a woman...The author has tried to make the sexuality of the yarn more believable...But all of the trappings still make it tough to accept...The play has a tall wall to scale.”
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“Unfortunately, as rewritten by Hwang and directed by Taymor, the piece is so cheapened that this curious tale of love and betrayal now drowns in weighty realism, down market visuals and Chinese Opera numbers that have all the grace of a second tier touring company. Despite best efforts of the talented Owen, we stop caring long before the lovers’ confrontation and court scenes...Julie Taymor divested the play of romance, smoke and mirrors paramount to its success.”
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"Taymor’s revival delivers some of the director’s customary flourish, but the story underneath, significantly revised by Mr. Hwang, feels hollowed out and robbed of its bite...Still, Taymor’s direction is fluid and often quite beautiful...In teasing queer desire to the fore, Hwang has necessarily tidied up the play’s frank and insightful look at dark underpinnings of straight male sexuality. But uncomfortable though they may be to interrogate, doing so could hardly be more urgent.”
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"This Broadway revival feels both over-dressed and dramatically under-nourished...In an age where gender fluidity is increasingly normalised, the revelation is hardly as shocking as it once was...The real drama is supposed to play out between Clive Owen’s diplomat and Jin Ha as his lover, but there's something rather tentative and passionless about this too; there's little sense of connection -- or jeopardy...Without being able to believe in their relationship, there’s not much at stake."
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"This re-invisioning of Madame Butterfly, with boundaries of gender and sexuality blurred, is subtly drawn...But it does have an epic sense of melodrama to it. Hwang doesn’t shy from writing it, and Taymor not from directing it...Owen is the perfect, slightly slapdash and messed-up foreign diplomat...The play’s major revelations are all Ha’s to effect. This is a fantastic performance."
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"The story is just as silly as the opera. And though we hear snatches of Puccini’s music throughout, Hwang and Taymor have no poetry of their own to redeem that silliness...The dialogue here veers into belaboured though not always accurate accounts of the Vietnam war...A play based on a real-life espionage scandal thus ends up seeming artificial...Several sequences mimicking Beijing opera do supply a stylish and enigmatic counterpoint to Hwang’s over-scripted story."
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“In this production, Hwang reveals more details and Taymor's staging is hit and miss...A sad, tender story, the secret of ‘M. Butterfly’ lies in a suspension of belief, letting Gallimard draw you unconditionally into his passionate affaire de coeur. Clive Owen gives a skilled performance as the complex man who chooses fantasy but Huang's rewriting and Taymor's staging deviate from the fine-spun illusion of mystery and culture.”
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"The play is talky but full of Hwang’s lively, sexy and knowing writing, which also spans the hot topic of men relentlessly trying to dictate how women should act...Taymor employs a series of rotating panels that are sometimes lovely and other times distancing...Required sparks of chemistry and shock value seem to be missing this time (the original version sent jolts), but by the end, Owen excels."
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